14 DAY TRIAL // Tom Cruise trains hard to stay in excellent shape and to be able to do his own stunts in action movies, like he also does in the upcoming “Mission: Impossible 5.” For a while there, the 52-year-old actor seemed to have gained a few pounds, and reports claimed that he was desperate to lose them as soon as possible.
Soon enough, he will stop focusing so much on staying in shape, because he will have to gain weight for a role in a new movie, Page Six reports.
Tom Cruise goes method
Rumor online has it that Tom’s weight is somewhere around 148 pounds (67 kg), so playing a guy twice as heavy as that would require one of two things: a fat suit of the kind he had on in “Tropic Thunder,” where he played the gross but hilarious Les Grossman, or going Method and actually gain the weight.
The report says he’s already set his mind on the latter to play “a porky pilot who trafficked drugs and guns for the Medellin Cartel and CIA in the 1980s” in “Mena.”
“‘Mena’ is being directed by Doug Liman and produced by Imagine’s Brian Grazer and Doug Davison. We hear Liman, who took over as director from Ron Howard, is headed to London, where Cruise has been filming ‘Mission: Impossible 5,’ to meet with the star. Gary Spinelli wrote the screenplay for ‘Mena,’ which Universal bought for $1 million [€880,874] in a reported bidding war last year,” Page Six says.
That’s a lot of details on a single project, which seems to indicate that the story is accurate. However, Cruise’s IMDB page is yet to reflect his coming on board this project, as his next movies listed after “MI 5” are “Top Gun 2” and the sequel to “Jack Reacher,” called “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.”
Stepping out of his comfort zone
Assuming the insider revealing this information to Page Six is right on the money, this role will be the first to see Cruise step out of his comfort zone like that.
Without saying he isn’t talented, Cruise has been somewhat of a character actor until now: he always plays the dashing, serious, dangerous and action-driven leading man around whom the entire cinematic universe revolves.
His Les Grossman turned out to be so incredibly popular for this reason too, among others: it allowed Cruise to completely lose himself in a character to the point where he was unrecognizable.
Tom Cruise is the ultimate action star, so having him play a leading man who looks very much unlike a leading man would be a definite step outside his comfort zone. It would also allow him to distance himself from his public persona and thus be taken more seriously as an actor, which is a move he’s probably considering seeing how, being 52, he can’t contemplate doing action movies for much longer, realistically speaking.
Then again, Sylvester Stallone is 68 and he’s still on a roll.